Chilly Gonzales in a Minor Key

Chilly Gonzales, the hybrid classical musician and orchestral rapper from Montreal who lives in Paris, was recently in the city. From his hotel downtown, he took a taxi to Times Square to see if he could find some sheet music at Colony Music, on Broadway at Forty-ninth Street, next door to the Brill Building, where you could walk in and hum a song and the staff would usually be able to find the music for you. Gonzales’s P.R. rep, Anthony D’Amato, was waiting at the entrance to tell him that Colony, it turned out, had closed in August, after sixty-four years. The windows were empty, but the electronic zipper above them was still working—“I found it at the Colony,” one message read. Gonzales opened the door to reveal a woman taping a box shut. A man came over and, a trifle menacingly, said, “Nobody’s allowed to be in here.”

Gonzales withdrew to the sidewalk. He is tall and dark haired, and he was wearing a magenta shirt and black pants. He had a small, turquoise suitcase, on rollers. Onstage he wears a bathrobe and crocheted wool slippers, a pair of which he happened to have in his suitcase—he knelt and opened his bag to display them. For his fancier performances he sometimes wears slippers with his initials on them, which he has made in Vienna. He had thought of trying to find a new pair of crocheted slippers in the city, for his performance at Lincoln Center, on November 1st, but decided he didn’t have time. He was due shortly at WNYC’s studios to play and be interviewed. D’Amato suggested another sheet-music store called Dowling Music, on Fifty-seventh Street.

“So, close-ish?” Gonzales asked.

Gonzales is forty, and his given name is Jason Beck. On the way to Dowling’s, dragging his suitcase, he said that Chilly Gonzales was a brand, not a persona. “At a certain moment, Jason Beck didn’t sound so good,” he said. “There was Beck, there was Jeff Beck. I wanted a name that dared people to underestimate me. To be a classical musician and amateur rapper isn’t that much of a stretch if your name is Chilly Gonzales.” Gonzales sometimes introduces himself as “Chilly Gonzales, musical genius.” He likes to make outrageous remarks, about music mainly, and then back them up with his playing. Among his accomplishments are two CD’s, “Solo Piano,” and “Solo Piano II,” but he is probably most widely known for his song “Never Stop,” which practically everyone has heard, since Apple used part of it as the theme song of the first iPad commercials.

Dowling Music is in the Steinway Building, where, in the showroom, the piano salesman sat behind desks like bank managers. “I used to work in a piano showroom,” Gonzales said. “People come back and back. No one impulse-buys a piano.”

A sign by the showroom entrance said that Dowling Music was on the second floor. Hauling his suitcase, Gonzales climbed the stairs, which led to a long, carpeted hallway. In one room someone could be heard tuning a piano. Gonzales turned the handle of a door to another room, which was slightly larger than the piano it contained. The light was off, and he turned it on and then he opened the keyboard and sat down. “I want to explain my theory of major and minor,” he said. “When you’re young and learning to play, what you’re doing is celebrating the status quo. What do I mean? By the music you’re playing, you’re celebrating the idea of an entrenched aristocracy, whose music is always in a major key—prancy, fascist music, in my opinion.” He played several bars of bright, assertive sounding music. “They called it major, which is to say, it’s important. It’s a conservative viewpoint—things are fine as they are. For me, as a fairly depressed child, that attitude didn’t reflect my melancholy outlook.”

Minor-key works were the product of overlooked people, Gonzales said, such as the Hungarian Jews from which he is descended. He played a simple study in a major key then played it in a minor key. “See, it’s more beautiful,” he said. Then he began to play “Happy Birthday to You” in a minor key, which sounded lugubrious, as if birthdays were for mourning time passed. He began a minor-key, funereal-sounding version of “Frère Jacques,” just as a woman carrying a clipboard appeared at the door and asked, “Can I help you?” D’Amato, who has dark hair and a beard and is slightly built, rose quickly and said, “Yes, uh, I had called,” and put his arm on the woman’s arm and began to walk down the hall with her. Gonzales, who had hardly broken stride, continued, “See, even ‘Frère Jacques’ sounds ominous in a minor key.” He went on to say that people of stature liked major keys. Music made by people who weren’t important, and which expressed their discontent, was typically in a minor key. “Who plays that,” he asked? “Min-or-i-ties.” Meanwhile, D’Amato returned. “I guess they charge people a lot of money to use these rooms for rehearsal,” he said. “Anyway, we’re late for our meeting.”

Gonzales decided to skip Dowling Music. On the street, while D’Amato held up his hand for a taxi, Gonzales said that in addition to having sold pianos, he also had “a piano-bar past. I played in one to support myself in college,” he said. A taxi drew up beside him. “It’s very depressing and humbling,” he continued. “People just want the song. No one cares in a piano bar if you’re a virtuoso.”